His Fear
by TotoroBird
Summary: While cleaning in Grimmuld Place, Ron comes across a boggart and realises what his true fear is. Set during OOTP. Romione, as always. Rated T for language. Reviews are much appreciated!


**A/N: I do not own Harry Potter (if I did, there would a hell of a lot more fluff, just saying). All belongs to J.K. Rowling. Thanks much to claraowl who helped me finish this off. thanks for reading and reviews are much appreciated!**

It was a dull winter day. There was light dusting of snow on the grey, concrete square outside. Every now and then a muggle would hurry past with an umbrella. Rain was falling, washing away the little natural beauty there was outside and making everything damp and sodden.

The colourless light from the sky coupled with the dim glow from the gas lanterns made for a dark, unfriendly room. Grimmuld Place was bleak enough as it was without the weather complimenting its desolation.

Ron Weasley stood in the front bedroom, unused as of the demise of Mrs. Black, Sirius's mother. It was a large grand room at the very peak of the house, beaten only by the dilapidated attic (Ginny had been left with that crap pile of a room), with a large, moth eaten four poster bed at the centre. It smelled undeniably like old people and hair potions. Apparently, Mrs. Black had not been a fan of ageing.

He stood, in the doorway, armed with a wand and a bucket full of furniture varnish, trying to steel himself for what he had to do next. Not only was he bitter at being forced to spend one of his final free days tidying this dump, he was overwhelmed by the lack of places to start.

The Christmas holidays were drawing slowly to a close. Molly Weasley had demanded all hands on deck: spring cleaning had begun. And there was so. Much. To. Clean.

For the most part, it had been a rather grim Christmas: the Order was always calling meetings, therefore forcing the reluctant teenagers out of the only comfortable rooms in the house - the very few comfortable rooms in the house - and leaving them to their own devices for several hours; Harry had spent a majority of the holiday skulking and brooding in a dark room with a hippogriff; and Ron's siblings had been in a sombre mood since Arthur had been put into St. Mungo's.

Still, there had been Hermione.

When she had turned up on the doorstep from skiing with her parents - whatever the hell that was supposed to be - lugging her suitcase, with a weary but nonetheless bright smile on her face, he was surprised, and, truth be told, very happy to see her. He wasn't sure whether it was because he missed decent company or something else he couldn't quite fathom, but he hugged her all the same in greeting, making her flush pink.

Life became a little more interesting after that. Sometimes, he would find himself in her and Ginny's room, and she would try for the billionth time to explain why muggles strapped pieces of wood to their feet and skated down mountains (he personally found it quite amusing). Soon, with Hermione's help - because they couldn't seem to be be able to do anything without her - they managed to pull Harry out of his bad mood, and then they were together again, laughing and joking as if nothing had ever come between them.

Ron felt happier, with both his best friends with him. He had missed both of them greatly, even though one of them had been in the same house the entire time, but for some reason, Hermione's arrival had the biggest impact on him. Every time he looked at Hermione, she was beaming, and he knew himself to be grinning back at her, simply because she was smiling. This feeling was completely new to him, foreign and confusing, but it was nice all the same.

Then Ron's mother had called for a house tidy. That's just about when he had lost the will to live. Especially when he was landed with that screaming wench's bedroom.

Harry had been stuck with dining room along with Fred and George. Hermione got the room below him, previously a guest room but was now used for sky high storage.

What he wouldn't have given to have Harry and Hermione in there with him. It would have made this much more bearable.

With a jolt, Ron realised he had been stood stationary for nearly ten minutes. Sighing, he walked over to a chest of drawers and with some difficulty, wrenched the top drawer open. He gagged and backed away rapidly from the contents: inside was the corpse of a sparrow, its bones stripped of all flesh and feathers.

'You have got to be kidding me,' he muttered as he pointed his wand at the open drawer. The foul-smelling creature rose up in the air then floated over to a bin bag, neatly landing at the bottom with a disgusting crunch. Cautiously, he peered into the drawer again. It was empty.

He cleared the rest of them with his wand, wanting to go nowhere near what turned out to be an animal graveyard. After disposing of a few hundred dead insects - she had had quite a collection of them - and some scraps of mouldy fur, he successfully finished the chest of drawers. It was a rather small victory as he was soon reminded of the rest of the room. Why was it so big? He could fit most of his house in that one goddamn room.

What felt like hours past, but in the reality it was only thirty minutes. Ron was very tempted to simply walk out and tell his mother where to shove it.

After all, leaving things until the last minute was something Ron was really good at.

As he mentally drew out an escape plan, the door opened and a exhausted looking Hermione walked in. She started when she saw him.

'Oh Merlin, Ron, you scared me!' She looked around puzzled, then slapped a hand to her forehead. 'I'm in the wrong room again. Sorry, I'll leave you to it.' As she turned to leave, Ron had the overwhelming urge to keep her here with him.

'Wait Hermione!' he called. She looked over her shoulder at him expectantly. 'Can- can you help me clean up this room?' It was a poor reason to stay, but he was desperate for some kind of distraction from mind-numbing boredom.

'But there's so much to be done in the room downstairs,' she sighed.

'I can help you with that if you help me with this.' Hermione looked round at the room in distaste, then sighed again in defeat.

'Fine, I'll help you.'

Picking up a cloth from the bucket, she got on her hands and knees and started scrubbing. After a minute, she looked up at Ron, who was stood watching her. 'Well you may as well start,' she pointed out.

'Oh yeah, sorry.' He joined her on the floor and she handed him a wet rag. He began scrubbing, trying to keep up with Hermione's vigorous pace. Her face was set with concentration, her lips pursed with the effort. He found himself watching them for a while. Her eyes flit up to look at him questioningly, and he realised he had stopped cleaning the floor altogether. Resuming the pace, he diverted his gaze to the peeling wallpaper, his face red.

'So why were you up here in the first place?' Ron asked, when the silence became too much for him.

'Ginny found a rather large spider in a cupboard and needed some help shifting it. She would have called for you, since you were closer, but...' she trailed off, smiling a little.

'...I have a pretty serious phobia,' he finished for her.

'Exactly.' Hermione sat back and looked around at the room. 'No wonder I keep getting lost in this house. The rooms look pretty much the same on each floor.'

Ron grinned. 'The first time I was here, it took me about twenty minutes to find the bathroom. Kept going round in circles.'

She laughed and his insides seemed to do a backflip. Then she looked solemn. 'I feel so sorry for Sirius, cooped up in this horrible place all the time. I would go insane.'

'Yeah, I can't imagine trying to live here. With all those damn spiders and all.' She laughed again.

'We should get on with this. Molly won't be too pleased if it isn't finished.' Hermione began scrubbing again, making the dark, wooden floorboards glisten. Ron smiled affectionately as that expression came over her face again. He was so very tempted to brush back the strand of wild brown hair that kept falling over her eyes.

'Ron, why don't you start on some on the furniture? I could probably finish the floor by myself.' Ron jolted out of his daze and nodded, blinking rapidly.

'Good idea,' he mumbled, getting up off the floor and grabbing his wand. 'I just hope there are no more dead animals.'

'Ew.'

A few more hours passed. They stayed in relative silence, but it was not in the least uncomfortable. As they gradually worked their way around the room, they would sometimes catch each other's eye and grin.

Thankfully, the amount of corpses stayed fairly low, though they managed to uncover a large family of rats. It took about twenty minutes to decide what to do with them.

'Ronald, no! I refuse to kill them.'

'Well what the hell do you suggest?'

'Set them free outside!'

'Oh yeah, because the world just needs more rats running around...'

After a while of this, they came to the agreement that maybe the rats should just stay where they are and die out in their own time.

Finally, they both stepped back and heaved a sigh of relief. The cleaning hadn't made much improvement: the room was still bone-chillingly cold and grim. Still, at least not every surface was covered in some kind of growth or mould.

'Well, I should probably get back down to the room downstairs. Are you alright to finish that wardrobe by yourself?' Hermione said, placing the rags back in the bucket and picking up her wand.

'Yeah, shouldn't take long,' he said. 'Thanks for the help. I'll be down soon.'

'Great,' she smiled and closed the door behind her.

Ron was left alone. A lot of the warmth in the room left with her and he shivered a little. The wardrobe nearly reached the ceiling, with a long chipped mirror on the door. The handle was nearly black with rust.

His wand in one hand, ready to kill off any arachnids that may lay inside, he pulled open the door and cried out in fear and surprise when something large fell out of the wardrobe onto the newly polished floor.

It was a girl, a girl covered in bleeding wounds and bruises, a mane of bushy brown hair partially covering her face. Hermione.

It couldn't be her - she had just left the room - but she looked oh so horribly real...and still. Ron backed into the wall, his face frozen in an expression of complete terror.

'Her- Hermione...' he gasped. It was all he could manage. Suddenly, she began to writhe around on the floor in obvious pain. Her lips were parted in screams that only he could hear. Her brown eyes were wide in fear.

'Hermione!' he yelled. The screams cut through him like a knife. She continued to thrash around. 'Shit! Hermione!'

The door burst open, and there stood Hermione, the wonderful, wonderful, real Hermione. 'Ron! What's wrong?'

Her eyes fell to her doppelgänger, and she cried out in panic, backing away. Her hand shakily pulled out her wand and pointed it at the girl who looked so like her. 'Ridikulus,' she whispered. The girl disappeared in a puff of black smoke.

Ron stood, gripping the wall behind him, breathing hard and still staring at the spot where the dying Hermione had been. Time seemed to have frozen. The screams were still ringing in his head, never ending. It was killing him.

Suddenly, Hermione was at his side, weaving her arms around his torso. He looked down at her in surprise, then wrapped his arms around her shoulders and hugged her to him. Her head fitted perfectly under his chin, and he buried his face in her hair. He barely noticed the tears spilling out of his eyes.

'It was a boggart, Ron, it wasn't me,' she murmured into his chest. Ron nodded, unable to say anything.

Hermione pulled away, but Ron kept her firmly in his grip. Her pale face flushed red but she kept her eyes firmly on his. 'Are you okay?'

'Yeah,' he croaked, gulping down tears.

Slowly, he released her and she stepped away. It felt like the gap was filling was freezing cold water. He wanted nothing more than to crush her to him again.

'You should go downstairs and get something to eat. You look terrible,' Hermione said, putting a hand to his cheek. Again he nodded. 'I'll finish the wardrobe. You go.'

'But Hermione-' she silenced him with a swift kiss on the forehead. Fireworks exploded in his chest. 'What was that for?' he mumbled in surprise.

'For caring about me,' she smiled. 'Now go. Honestly, you look like you're going to faint.' With that, she turned away, picked out a rag from the bucket and once again began polishing the dark wood.

After a moment of trying to catch up with the last few minutes' events, Ron came back to his senses and, reluctantly, left the room.

Inside, there was an eruption occurring: a blast of mixed emotions battling out. There was so much going on in his head, so much to contradict the events of the day, that he could barely articulate one from the other, nor could he understand why the spot where her lips touched was burning.

'What's up with you?' Ron was brought crashing down to Earth. Harry stood, looking at him questioningly.

'Nothing,' he lied almost automatically. Harry's dark eyebrows rose high above the top of his glasses. Ron avoided his piercing green eyes.

'Where's Hermione?'

'In there,' Ron indicated somewhere behind him, 'Let's get something to eat.'

Though Harry didn't seem satisfied with Ron's answers, he shrugged them off anyway, and the two headed down to the kitchen.

Ron and Hermione never spoke of the boggart incident. It was almost as if it had never happened. Though it had been a disturbing occurrence that had shaken Ron's world horribly, he in no way regretted its happening.

He was still confused by his feelings - of course he was, it was Ron - but it had awakened him to something new, and quite frankly, beautiful.

She was no longer just his know-it-all friend who saved his skin from detentions and such. As it turned out, much to his surprise, his affections ran deeper than he had expected.

But he said nothing.

After all, leaving things until the last minute was something Ron was really good at.

Especially when it came to Hermione Granger.

**A/N: Wasn't sure how to end this, so I finished it the way I thought Ron would.**


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